OK. It's quite old.The brand is MPD - well that's the case anyway.It has a 5V power supply and a power on/off switch.It has two lights: a blue power and a green light.

When you plug in the power and turn it on the blue light comes on and there is a couple of seconds disk activity.

When you then plug it into a USB port on the computer, the disk just starts a rhythmic slow paced seek routine. The Blue light goes purpley red and the green light flashes red slowly in time with the seek routine. It never stops and the computer doesn't find it as a USB device.

From this state:- If you unplug the device from the USB port, it goes back to just the blue light on and a couple of seconds of disk activity- If you turn the power off the blue light goes off and the green one stays on.

If you then turn the power on again it sort of goes click click click ...... etc. The Blue light goes purpley red and the green light flashes red/green in time with the clicks.

Sounds like either a drive thats given up, or the power adaptor for the enclosure isnt pumping enough juice into it. My little WD external drive does similar when i plug it into some USB ports on PC's - its USB powered but if the USB port dosent put enough current through, the drive just clicks - soon as I plug it into another USB (usually rear ports) it works fine.

PSLog: Thanks for that suggestion James.A quick look at the documentation suggests that before I could use this on the disk, the computer has to be able to "see" it. Can you confirm that this is the case?

I am not familiar with Windows, so can't answer that for you. It is free open source software, what do you have to lose in trying?

It does say that the drive must be detected with the correct size to work, but it detected my drive even though its not displayed in windows. Still scanning, basically runs in DOS but mite get results!

Qualified in business, certified in fibre, stuck in copper, have to keep going ^_^

Well I couldn't recover anything with that software but probably because hardware is stuffed. However watch out that the program saves a huge log file in the directory you run it in. After 4GB of logging "unreadable" messages I gave up.

Qualified in business, certified in fibre, stuck in copper, have to keep going ^_^

If the PC can't "see" the drive then you won't be able to scan it with Windows. A bootable tool like MHDD (marvellous app) will scan a drive if it can be seen by the BIOS but not necessarily by the OS. If something has eaten the partition table then unless there's something REALLY important on the drive, I'd just give up on it.

Portable drives tend to use pretty power powersupplies so you might try cracking the case open and physically plug the drive into a IDE/SATA port on a PC motherboard, that way you take the USB controller and power adapter out of the equation.

Some drives (like the cheap Western Digital ones) use proprietary controller-boards built into the drives themselves so if the USB->SATA controller fails, you throw the whole drive out unless you can happen to find one from a 100% identical model to swap over. The cheap 3.5" drives also seem to be quite prone to failure in my experience.